Friday, 17 October 2014

Viktor Olgyai studied under William Unger in Vienna and under Theodore Alphonse in Paris. As he originally intended to devote himself entirely to the graphic arts, and only later took up oil-painting, his technical knowledge of etching is remarkable. He is pre-eminently a draughtsman, and though his plates are finely toned, the most notable thing about them is their sense of line. Some of his best works are contained in an album of ten plates entitle 'Winter,' and other notable ones are The Oak, The Mill and Way of Cypresses.

Thursday, 16 October 2014

I have been going to the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool for 35 years. It is a key part of the cultural life of Liverpool. It was recently re-built from scratch and it is superb.Tonight it won the RIBA Stirling award.

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

The ex Cambridge University physicist and educator Sanjoy Mahajan (of Streetfighting Mathematics renown), has been busy with an outfit called Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) which is here.

Mahajan has continued his interests in teaching maths and physics without rote learning methods - building on the pioneering work of Louis Benezet (1935), Etta Berman (1935) and Harold Fawcett (1938) also re-counted in Flener (2001) HERE.

Here is a great site. A collection of wierd images from Google Earth - collected by the Brooklyn based artist Clement Valla.

From the INFO:

I collect Google Earth images. I discovered strange moments where the
illusion of a seamless representation of the Earth’s surface seems to
break down. At first, I thought they were glitches, or errors in the
algorithm, but looking closer I realized the situation was actually more
interesting — these images are not glitches. They are the absolute
logical result of the system. They are an edge condition—an anomaly
within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error.
These jarring moments expose how Google Earth works, focusing our
attention on the software. They reveal a new model of representation:
not through indexical photographs but through automated data collection
from a myriad of different sources constantly updated and endlessly
combined to create a seamless illusion; Google Earth is a database
disguised as a photographic representation. These uncanny images focus
our attention on that process itself, and the network of algorithms,
computers, storage systems, automated cameras, maps, pilots, engineers,
photographers, surveyors and map-makers that generate them.